


kiss/consume

by imgonebye



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/F, a real gosh darn hot mess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-22
Updated: 2015-10-22
Packaged: 2018-04-27 12:15:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5048206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imgonebye/pseuds/imgonebye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You could run away with me."<br/>AU/alternate ending to 9x02 The Witch's Familiar.</p>
            </blockquote>





	kiss/consume

**Author's Note:**

  * For [firelordazulas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/firelordazulas/gifts).



_these violent delights have violent ends and in their triumph die, like fire & powder . . ._ 

* * *

_HEY MISSY YOU SO FINE, YOU SO FINE YOU BLOW MY MIND, HEY MISSY! HEY MISSY!_

Clara fumbles for her phone, too shocked to be horrified, or amused, or even impressed as Missy’s (surprisingly pleasant, but again, she isn’t really processing anything at the moment) voice swells out of her phone’s speaker at a decibel level that she is fairly certain her phone should not be able to reach. When she finally gets her hands around her phone she realizes it’s her ringtone (and now that she’s no longer frantically grappling with her phone, she has time to be horrified _and_ amused _and_ impressed, all in the same breath) and she’s got a call.

INCOMING CALL: MISSY is superimposed over her contact picture—which Clara _definitely_ did not take—of Missy blowing a kiss to the camera. She notes with some annoyance that Missy has attached _several_ heart emojis to her name. _How the hell did she get my phone?_

“What the hell is that?” the Doctor snaps, clearly having paid no attention at all to her struggle.

“It’s—Missy. She’s calling.” Clara’s got her thumb over the red “REJECT” button.

“ _What_?” Ah, there we go. Now he’s interested. He bounds over to her in a few short steps and snatches the phone out of her hands. He stares at the screen, then at her, then the screen again. “Did _you_ put those hearts?”

“What— _no_! She must’ve done it somehow—”

He swipes across the screen and barks a curt “ _What_!” into the transmitter, then puts the phone on speaker.

“My goodness.” Missy’s amused tones crackle through the receiver at the same earsplitting level that the ringtone did and Clara flinches at the sound. The Doctor seems entirely unbothered, which annoys her nearly more than Missy changing her ringtone did. “You seem to have forgotten your manners.”

_EXTERMINATE!_

“ _Oh, give it a rest before you strain something_ —Now then, when are you going to pick me up?”

“Why on Earth would we be coming to pick you up?” Clara asks, preempting the _why_ and the possible future _we’re on the way_ she sees sparkling quizzically in the Doctor's eyes.

“Oh goodness me, do I really have to spell it out for you, miss clever clogs? All right, let’s do some basic computing. Me—Time Lady, Queen of Evil, megalomaniacal conqueror—conqueress? You humans have the most appalling gendered words. If ‘Mistress’ didn’t have _such_ a ring to it—”

 _EXTERMINATE_!

“— _I said give it a rest you bad tempered garbage bin_ —” Missy’s voice grows distant for a moment, and Clara can hear a muffled _clunk_ , almost like a certain Time Lady’s foot colliding with the side of a dalek. “Anyway. As I was saying, Me, evil, all into this ruling a planet and having an army thing. You, the Doctor and . . . expendable, popping off into space leaving me on a planet which has just conveniently developed a massive power vacuum and I know what you’re thinking, aren’t all the daleks dying? Well my good friend over here—” again with the _clunk_ , this time followed by a short _ERK_ from a dalek that Clara is actually beginning to feel for, “—might be an empty tin can, but the thing we’ve learned about these empty tin cans is that they’re the important dalek parts, aren’t they? They’re the _hate_. So I’d like to ever so cordially invite the both of you to consider what might happen when you leave an ambitious and destructive lunatic alone on Skaro with all the tools to make herself a dalek army? I’ll wait.”

 _EXTERMINATE_!

The Doctor opens his mouth, and Clara decides she isn’t going to let him get a word in edgewise. Not this time—she’s not getting offered up to the daleks as a bargaining chip and/or sacrifice because somewhere in his bizarre and complex moral code the “Do Not Kill” box next to “Genocidal Maniac Time Lady” has been ticked.

“It sounds like the daleks are going to stop you for us,” she blurts before the Doctor can get even a syllable out. It’s not particularly witty or, you know—it would be nice to get in a good, smarting jab before Missy is reduced to subatomic mist. But actions are worth more than words, aren’t they, which means that the wittiest retort will be realized when she and the Doctor leave Missy alone on Skaro with only the dalek sewers for company.

Another muffled _clunk_ , and then: _EX—TRK_!

“What was that you said, dearie? I had to put the phone down for a second. You said something about my plans being thwarted by—” _MERCY_! “—who now?”

“We can’t just leave her,” the Doctor mutters to Clara out of the corner of his mouth.

“What d’you mean, ‘we can’t just leave her’?” Clara demands. As far as she can see, we _can_ in fact just leave her. In fact, she would go so far as to say that they _should_ leave Missy. In the eternal battle of Time Lord vs. Dalek the odds are heavily in favor of the Time Lord (or Lady, in this case), but when you factor in pure, unfettered insanity and the fact that Missy’s survival strategy sounds an awful lot like she’s just _kicking_ the things (and Clara knows from experience that the battle of Metal Object vs. Shoe-Clad Foot was won by Metal Objects sometime approximately around the Bronze Age) . . . those aren’t particularly bad odds against never seeing Missy again. Which she _wouldn’t_ mind, she huffily informs the part of her brain that has chosen now to remind her that leaving someone to die is not a decision she should so happily make. After all, Missy _killed_ Danny—

 _Except she didn’t_ , says that traitor part of her brain, which she refuses on principle to call her conscience. _Except she brought him back, really. Except she more or less brought about a series of circumstances through which you_ could _save him, although that was definitely unintentional because as I am well aware, a generous estimate of Missy’s interest in sustaining human life would be no interest whatsoever._

The Doctor covers the transmitter of her cell phone with one hand and gestures violently with the other. _CAN YOU_ —he starts to mouth at her, but Missy cuts him off.

“Manners, Clara! Now listen, I’ll make this easy for the both of you,” Missy says. She is deadly quiet now, and her tone is level for once. No pet names, no eccentric interjections—just the ice of eons and that unsettlingly human accent that feels almost anachronistic here. “ _If_ you leave me here and _if_ it just so happens that I survive the attacks of the few remaining daleks on this planet, then I will personally make it my mission to assemble an army and ravage my way toward Earth. And if you know anything about me, Doctor, it is that I will _always_ survive and I will _always_ come after you.”

It is dead silent in the TARDIS for a second, until Missy speaks again, all brightness and pitch restored to her voice. “So change the game, why don’t you? Come on, hup-two, we haven’t got all day!”

* * *

“Wake up, sleepyhead,” a voice coos gently into Clara’s ear. “I’ve made breakfast.”

A hand brushes hair away from her face and she groans, half-convinced she’s dreaming because that’s a woman’s voice and they don’t have women on the TARDIS except her—

and _MISSY_.

Clara forces her eyelids open, sees nothing besides air, and gets in a good half-second of _Oh, it was just a drea_ —

“Over here, dearie,” Missy chirps.

From behind her.

The human race has not and never will develop an expletive profane enough for moments like these. The panicked blast of electric impulses in her brain manifest themselves as a single internal scream so loud that it turns into an audible, albeit strangled, squeak. Clara tries to roll over and away at the same time and dramatically fails to accomplish the latter, as she’d planned ‘away’ before she rolled and thus finds herself propelled even closer toward Missy’s crystalline unblinking baby blues and lipsticked alligator grin. Their foreheads bump before she can stop her propulsion, and Missy plants a little kiss on Clara’s nose, then another one, all gentleness and looking deceptively human and just a wee bit soft.

But only the wee-est bit: her lipstick is a vicious pink this morning, and when she smiles it is the same inhuman forward motion, like her lips can't quite contain her teeth.

“Good morning, sunshine,” she says.

Clara finds energy in her limbs and jolts upright with a yelp that is half shock and half anxiety, knocking Missy off of the covers in the process. The blood rushes to her head and she takes a moment to wobble woozily, her vision flashing dark as she scrambles to pull all her groggy senses back into alignment. She heaves a massive, head-splitting yawn and stretches awkwardly, a little too cognizant of the other person in the room to not feel a slight twinge of embarrassment over everything, from her ratty pajamas to the audible click of her vertebrae. Oh yeah, and another thing—exactly _how_ long was Missy lying next to her?

Clara opts for an easier question to deal with. "Do you even _sleep_?"

While she has been trying to get her sleep-addled body acquainted with her brain's state of rudely-awakened high alert, Missy has climbed back to her feet; she stands now by the side of the bed, rocking back and forth from heel to toe impatiently.

"You've got something on your nose," Missy says smugly.

Today (is it even day? For all Clara knows, she's been shaken awake at 3 o'clock in the morning because _someone_ doesn't know how to play well with others) Missy has ditched the deranged Edwardian schoolmarm ensemble in favor of twenty-first century garb. She smoothes the wrinkles out of her white button-down shirt and gives Clara just the briefest raise of her eyebrows. There's something almost unsettling about how human she looks in blue jeans and dark, knee-high riding boots—almost like a proper woman, Clara thinks. She winces: that thought sounds ruder than it ought to. Missy looks—good? More normal than usual, certainly. Missy has that kind of knowing glint in her eye (same as the Doctor, must be a Time Lord thing) that says _I know_ exactly _what you're going to think before your neurons even start thinking about firing_. She makes Clara uncomfortable, like her thoughts are spilling out her ears and shouting themselves into the air.

Clara thumbs her nose and comes away with the slightest smear of hot pink, so she licks her thumb and rubs again. Missy watches her silently, all mock-innocence and breeze.

"How long were you there?" Clara asks waspishly, rubbing the lipstick on her worn pajama pants.

Missy ignores this question as well. She pulls up a chair that Clara recognizes as definitely not having been in her room before she went to sleep and places it backwards against the bed, straddling it and crossing her forearms over its wooden back.

At this point, Clara figures she has two options. The first is to run screaming down the hall to the Doctor and rehash the same argument they've had for the past two days, the one where he refuses to dump Missy on the first shithole planet they find and reminds Clara that he can drop her off and pop back once he's figured out what to do with Missy. _Won't take more than an hour_. The second is to put up and shut up, to accept the constant and intrusive invasions to her personal space and to follow the Doctor's example and ignore literally everything Missy does. The first has continuously proved unfruitful and the second seems impossible, but Clara can't see herself leaving the Doctor alone with Missy and her constant needling suggestions, and she certainly can't see herself being any more okay with waking up next to a genocidal maniac in the morning. In fact, she's surprised by how well she is taking it: only few undignified noises and some moderately controlled struggling. She's been practically _nonchalant_ about this whole situation.

Missy half-watches her, fiddling absently with the sleeves of her blouse. That's another thing, probably another Time Lord thing—they always seem to be watching, picking up every detail while simultaneously distracted. It was probably required learning for them— _here's how you pilot a time machine and here's how you completely unnerve everyone around you. Off you go, then!_ Clara feels small and exposed, kind of the way she imagines that chickens must feel every time the farmer comes by to gather their eggs.

“Don’t you want breakfast?” Missy asks, like Clara’s train of thought reminded her.

 _Oh, right_. Clara forgot about the ‘I’ve made breakfast’ part of her awakening—somehow, she thinks sarcastically. After all, whose first thought _isn’t_ breakfast when they wake up next to a dangerous lunatic?

“Fine,” she says. She isn’t hungry at all, just morbidly curious. What on earth could Missy possibly—

 _Oh_. She doesn’t think the word so much as feel it as Missy passes her a white china plate with a . . . thing on it.

It can’t honestly be called toast, the entirely black square of what Clara has to assume is bread, if only because what else is that exact shape? She picks the burn up gingerly with one hand and holds it up, raising her eyebrows at Missy, who looks strangely proud of her complete inability to work a basic appliance.

“Exactly how old are you again?”

Clara is holding the burnt piece of toast gingerly between her thumb and forefinger, which has given her exactly enough contact with the char to realize that it is cold, like it’s been sitting here for hours. Odd, because she can’t imagine Missy having even an ounce of patience in her.

Missy puts on a pout. “You should never ask a lady her age—ooh, or do you like them old?”

“What?”

“Pretty girl like you runs off to travel the universe with a grumpy old man in the most unimpressive time machine ever fathomed—what’s the deal, what’s the _sitch_ , what’s the down-low—”

“Do you _ever_ stop running your mouth?”

“Not usually,” she says, then raises her eyebrows thoughtfully. “Unless I'm given something else to do with it.” She winks massively, mouth half-open in a sort of cartoonishly suggestive expression. _If you know what I mean_.

Folding the burnt piece of toast in half, Clara leans across her bed and shoves as much as it as she can into Missy’s mouth. “Does that work?” she snaps, and Missy’s eyes sparkle with laughter.

* * *

Days pass and Missy shows no sign of leaving, nor the Doctor of any ultimate exit plan for her.

Clara has never stayed on the TARDIS for this long at a time, and she can feel the cabin fever beginning to set in. Most days, she can't even find the Doctor on the TARDIS; Missy disappears for hours on end only to reappear in whatever deep recess of the TARDIS Clara has wandered off into. 

This is possibly one of the worst decisions she's made recently. Or ever.

"I'm going to lose it," she mumbles to herself one silent morning, watching her phone's digital clock tick from 11:03 to 11:04 AM. 

"Oh, I highly recommend that," Missy says.

Clara doesn't jump anymore. Missy's sudden appearance shock value has diminished since she began to pop up so regularly. And it's not as terrifying anymore. A few weeks of boredom and stagnancy punctuated by just a couple of hours-long excursions (always sans-Missy), and anyone would be a welcome presence. Missy seems edgeless without her army and without anyone to vaporize. Almost like a weird neighbor with no concept of personal space who leaves lipstick on your face just because she can—and laughs at your furious blush when she swoops out of nowhere and kisses you on the cheek.

Clara hasn't quite come to grips with that part yet.

“Why do you keep saying you’re insane?” she asks, in lieu of a shocked gasp or an annoyed groan.

“Oh, I am. Horribly so.” Missy grins wolfishly. “I know, I wear it so well, I don’t do human things like bang my head against the wall and babble about Revelations and _dribble_ , but I promise, I’m positively batty.”

“Or just evil?”

Missy hisses with an emotion that Clara can’t quite identify and steps forward with a click of heels, effectively pinning her against the console. They’re about the same size, so it’s not like Clara’s really trapped in a way that she can’t wriggle or push her way out of, but there’s a snap of anger in Missy’s eyes that seems to only spark up before she starts vaporizing people.

“Do you know how Time Lords do insanity? We look into the strands of time weaving themselves across the continuum of existence and feel our minds burn at the sight and realize that the universe _never_ ends, not _ever_ , not even when everything dies because then it just starts up again, and that it never starts, not _ever_ , and that everything that ever exists dies and makes no mark on the universe because there is no measurement infinitesimal enough to register how meaningless we are—and some of us can’t accept that and those are the ones that we call sane, and some of us take it all in and decide that’s fine, and those are the ones we call insane. And do you know why?”

Clara can barely swallow so much as speak. She leans back over the console, away from the primal fire that burns cold in Missy’s pale eyes. “No,” she whispers, unsure if the word is even audible. She doesn’t want to know.

“Neither do I,” Missy says with a small, tight smile. She eases back slightly, giving Clara just enough room to breathe. The tension between them is not in any way abated by this anticlimax. Clara doesn’t know if she has hackles or what they are, but if she does, they’re up; every part of her being is tense.

“You’re fine with that? Leaving no mark?”

“Of course I am!” Missy’s gaze loses that burn-through-your-retinas quality and goes a different kind of sharp that is unassuming and guileless but nonetheless clever, just a type of clever that seems, somehow, characteristically mortal. “It’s so much more fun that way. You can do whatever you want!”

“But then . . . what’s the point of it all?”

“Why does there have to be one?”

“Because . . .” Clara fumbles, frustrated. She hates why questions that devolve and devolve because sooner or later you get to _what’s the point of anything?_ and _is there a point at all?_ , neither of which can be answered. “Because there has to be?”

She doesn’t believe that Missy is being entirely honest with her. She doesn’t believe that Missy is comfortable in the knowledge that she can travel to any point in all of existence—in eternity—yet never make a difference or even leave behind a mark. Maybe this is the Time Lord madness, this act of denial, of detachment, of being a satellite to your own reality. It’s just like human madness, then.

And despite all of Missy’s exhaustive damnation of human emotion and philosophy, how different is she? It isn’t empathy that Clara feels now, because the statute of limitations for empathy expires at about the end of the average human lifetime. She can’t empathize with Missy, but she can at least vaguely grasp the horror.

It’s electric, contagious—

"Your concepts of existence are so outdated," Missy complains, breaking the paralyzed pause Clara has fallen into. "I've given up on them entirely."

She closes the gap.

So. Kissing Missy turns out to be entirely what Clara expected—would have expected. Would. Because she didn't. At no point did she think about kissing her.

If her neurons could blush, they would.

But it does turn out to be exactly what one would expect if one had done any contemplation. Missy is handsy and . . . toothy, and Clara realizes that she doesn't mind this as much as she usually does as Missy bites her lower lip and slides one hand down the small of her back. After a few thousand years, it would appear that one gets good at biting.

There's an unease to this, a sort of noxious imbalance; Missy's teeth click against hers in a jarring way and she thinks about the genocide, the hate, the complete aversion to ethics—

The emptiness of time around her, the searing kiss of the void against her lips.

 _I hate you. I hate what you are._ Except she doesn’t, and she can’t.

Missy may not have convinced the Doctor that they're cut from the same cloth, but she has more than started to convince Clara.

Her mouth tastes like spit and pepper, almost human, just like the hand that is twining itself through Clara's hair and tugging. Her eyes are bright and clear and she doesn't shut them, not even when Clara bites back and nips a coat of lipstick off her lower lip. They're so clear that Clara thinks she might be able to see Missy's abattoir mind through them, and smell the stink of death and stale centuries of madness and despair, so she squeezes her eyes shut because she's never wanted anything so much as to just enjoy this moment.

When Missy releases her, Clara remembers the Doctor's gobsmacked expression all those days/ages ago back at 3W because she knows she looks just as buffoonishly usurped of her senses as he did then.

Missy kisses the tip of her nose, then both of her eyelids, humming a tuneless, pleased note under her breath. Clara opens her eyes now, sees the smug expression on Missy’s face and huffs with annoyance.

“Don’t look so pleased with yourself,” she says.

“Oh, but I am,” Missy says.

She steps close again, but this time Clara backs away.

“What do you want from me?” she asks, half-pleading, like this is a horror movie and Missy’s got the axe and is pacing up and up the stairs.

“What?” Missy cocks an eyebrow and wrinkles her nose.

“Why—why did you do that? I don’t understand,” Clara says and she’s speaking fast now, fast like she runs through time and fast because she wants to run away but her feet won’t move. “Why are you here? Why haven’t you left? Why did you help me meet the Doctor and why are you enemies but _not good at it at all_ and why do you keep talking to me when you so clearly hate humans—”

“Dearie,” Missy interrupts, all saccharine despite the sour expression that lingers on her face. “Why do you have to understand everything all the time?”

“Human nature?”

“Oh, bosh. You barely qualify as human.”

That’s it, right there—the thing about Missy that simultaneously entrances her and makes her want to scream and jump out of the TARDIS into empty space. Take an assumption, an expectation, some idea you’ve accepted as intrinsic or factual or necessary or _whatever_ and present it to Missy and be met with blatant denial of that idea, an abrupt paradigm shift, and a complete realignment of your understanding of your self, your universe, your existence, and whatever else there is that happens that is not filed under those three topics. She doesn’t let Clara keep the thoughts she _needs_ to have, the thoughts that the Doctor lets her keep because he knows that if he didn’t, she’d flee in a second. But Missy interfaces with knowledge in a different way, an _Oh, really?_ to the standard _Of course_.

For example, when considering that you, Clara Oswald, have a type, and it is people, human people, usually men but not always, who are near or near-ish to your own age, with a berth that extends _maybe_ ten years and only in extenuating circumstances, and also people—human people—who are not evil, who do not kill for fun or on a whim or for _any_ reason, really, all it takes is Missy to bite your lips and grab your ass through your skirt for you to think, type who? type how?

And when Clara says she thinks the Doctor is a good man (though she uses ‘man’ and ‘good’ loosely and variably), Missy just raises an eyebrow and Clara thinks _well, yeah_ , because of course the Doctor is not a good man. He never has been and never will be, but that’s not the kind of thought you allow yourself to have when you’re wandering the galaxy with him. He’s a resourceful creature, a practical thing, a being of bargaining and intensity and all the sorts of amoralities that come with eons of age.

“Excuse me?”

“You’re nothing like a human,” Missy says flatly. “Hmmm, don’t give me that look. Think about it.”

Clara thinks about it for all of a second then decides she won’t, that Missy can’t make her. That she was just kissed breathless and she’ll take a break, thank you, to recover from this first paradigm shift before tilt-a-whirling her way into a second. “No,” she says, more firmly than she feels. “I’m good, thanks.”

Her words startle a laugh out of Missy, who takes another step forward. This time, Clara doesn’t back away.

“Ooh, dearie, you know, you don’t play nice at _all_ ,” she says, and Clara fancies that there is just the slightest breathless edge to her tone.

“No,” Clara says. “I suppose not.”

They stand unmoving for a moment, until Missy finally says:

“You could run away with me.”

“I—” Well, she _could_. Grammatically speaking, she does indeed have the capability to—but why? And why is it that a horrible little impulsive part of her wants to?

It feels right, that’s the thing. It feels as right as running off with the Doctor ever did and then some. It feels more honest. Where the Doctor maintains his facade of decency (which Clara is increasingly learning to distrust), Missy practically puts up a full-page ad in every major newspaper in the country for her complete lack of morality. _Choose me, Missy: I haven’t an ethical bone in my body! And I’ll break all of yours, if you like._

“Why?”

"I could hold a knife to your throat if you'd like," she says. “Make it like a proper hostage situation.”

“Yeah, no thanks,” Clara says. “I’d like an answer, please.”

Missy’s question-asked-to-answer ratio is something like 5:1, and even this time she looks like she has to mull it over. "Because I like you?" It's not an answer at all, as Missy's voice quirks up to hit an even higher register at the tail end of the question than she usually does. She's just trying to find an answer that Clara likes.

And isn't that an answer in its own right? That someone like Missy, who so obviously could care less about making friends or keeping people alive, would invent an answer or just blatantly lie her ass off to get Clara to go with her?  _  
_

"You know what I think? I think you're lonely."

"Am  _not_ ," Missy retorts, that same snap of anger springing into her eyes at the challenge.

"Are so," Clara says. She isn't sure where she finds the courage but she leans in to kiss Missy again, just to see . . .

Missy's mouth tastes like a bad idea and her lips are alarmingly soft and just a touch dry and so deceptively human. Clara thinks she might just give it a go.

* * *

Legends brew into prophecies at the edges of the universe, and in the space between planets, and in the times after war when its ravages are healing and the bright bud of life needs hope’s light to bloom. The Doctor learns his timeline in the whispered wonders shared in these empty spaces, the whispers that echo and reverberate and become mythology, tales of becoming and unbecoming.

For centuries he hears whispers of two women, neither entirely human but one less than the other, who will stride through time like it is mist and claim to be friends of the Doctor. When the vaporous tendrils of legend collide and intertwine, where he is known as a warrior they are known as assassins, and where he is known as a healer they are not known at all.

One of the two trails behind her a cloud of maddening red, and sees across time to what has been and shall be. She is carnivorous in her defense of the other.

The Doctor has come to recognize the reverence that colors the tones of those who whisper of Time Lords, the way they fumble for words and settle on either _god_ or _human_ because they cannot reconcile the two and find the space in between. He also knows that somewhere on his timeline, he dissolves to madness; this must be a step past that time. These women must be a future Doctor and her companion, he thinks, but what human would ever run with such a creature? What human would be permitted to? And what human would survive?

As is always the case, there is a story that runs contrapuntal to this:

There are two women, neither entirely human but one less than the other, who stride through time like it is mist and claim to be friends of the Doctor. One of the two trails behind her a cloud of maddening red, and sees across time to what has been and shall be. The other is human until she is not, until she is angry; then she is carnivorous in her defense of the other. They would die for each other, but neither would allow it.

The Doctor is less sure what to make of this, but he does with both of these stories what he does with every murmur of his future: forgets.

One morning Clara takes Missy by the hand and from that contact ricochets up into her brain an electrical impulse that crackles through her synapses in quaternate drum-beats, and she knows that she can never let go and be human again. Every time she touches her static crackles between their skin, so she cleaves so tightly to her that there is no room between them even for atoms.

Missy was right, she thinks as the drums pound a link from their clasped hands to their disparate hearts. She isn’t human, not anymore. She’s not anything like she used to be, the Impossible Girl terrified by the boundlessness of space and its empty, lonely void. She’s a child of the stars now, ricocheting from planet to planet, coruscating through time to the beat of the drums. The madness catches and _ignites_.

 

**Author's Note:**

> In case you couldn't tell, I haven't been keeping up with DW at ALL. I watched exactly 4 episodes last week (guess which ooooooones) and this is the result. This is entirely tori's fault, and the ending takes some inspiration from "who's a heretic now?" because of that. as always, i am so sorry. but i threw in a shakespeare quote so it's all good right?  
> (please review if you want i love reviews)


End file.
